Canonical’s Neil Jagdish Patel has just announced a new release of Unity – Ubuntu’s forthcoming ‘Ubuntu Light’ interface as well as the Ubuntu Netbook interface replacement.

This update brings global search in the ‘Places’ pane thus allowing you to find what you’re looking for in the relevant fields. Also added is ‘initial integration between the Appindicator framework and Unity.’ On the Aytana Developers Mailing list Patel goes on to note two ‘cool things’ this will bring: -

“When an application like Banshee or Tomboy creates and appindicator that shows up on your panel, you should see it in the Unity launcher too. This also means that if the application hides it’s window (like Rhythmbox, Banshee and Tomboy do), it still shows up in the launcher with a "running" indicator. We hope that this will lead to less confusion for users when these "no-guaranteed-window" applications are running. Things like Dropbox, Gnome Power Manager etc are automatically ignored (or should be!).”

“So, we know that the application has an indicator and the awesome interface of Appindicator uses a MVC-style menu-exporting system using dbusmenu, so what comes to mind next? Stick these application’s menus in the quicklists when you right-click on an application! This is *very* new so please treat it with care :)”

For now applications that also use Indicators will remain in both panel and launcher whilst the team “weed out all the bugs”. He also goes on to note, as we so often point out, that ‘Unity is still pending final visual design, so please don’t take what you see in the builds as final (especially in places), as we could be using placeholders etc’